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Blogging 101: Understanding Analytic Information for your Blog

So not only did I consider doing this post for other bloggers but honestly I needed to help myself understand the basics of analytic information. With our blog growing we now work for companies that sometimes pay us for our services and they require our analytic information so that they feel confident we are the right bloggers for the job. Honestly until today I never grasped the technical information as far as unique visitors, bounce rate, etc. and decided to google the information and get some understanding. From what I've found, I realized that I should have googled this a loooooong time ago because the information is so easy to understand:

Total Page views: The total number of hits your blog has received since it's existence.

Monthly Page views: The number of hits your blog has received for the month.

Sessions: The number of times visitors are actively engaged on your blog. Each visitor will have at least one session but can have multiple sessions (This is also your page views but Google Analytics refers to it as "Sessions").

Users/Unique Visitors: How many individual visitors have at least one session on your blog.

Bounce Rate: The percent of visits that are single page only. The higher the bounce rate is an indication that visitors are leaving as soon as they enter your site for a vast amount of reasons. I'm assuming you want to keep your bounce rate under 50%.

Pages: The average number of pages viewed during a session on your blog.

Percent of New Users: First time visitors.

Now all of this info is geared towards everyone who uses Google Analytics, but the terminology is pretty much the same across the board. Alexa is also a great analytic tracking system but to track the most useful information you have to sign up for a paid subscription. But what I found out is you can still type your blog's url in at Alexa.com and find out what your rank is globally and in the United States and also find out the bounce rate for your site, all free of charge. Here is also a list of some other popular analytic tracking websites: